The Venture Science Doctorate (VSD) program, 3rd cohort, starting September 2025.

Join the world’s first 3-year venture creation focused PhD program run by Deep Science Venture College at Woolf University: a globally recognised, decentralised institution widening access to higher education. Our focus is exclusively on solving global challenges in health, climate, agriculture and computation through science as the basis for designing research projects from first-principles, and creating new companies founded by candidates based on this research.

The VSD is backed by a philanthropic consortium of mission aligned Partners, including Schmidt Futures, Innovate UK, SPRIND and Anglo American, and embedded in a global R&D coalition of universities and national labs, including National Physical Laboratory, the James Hutton Institute, Imperial College, Max Planck, the University of Edinburgh, University College London, Goldsmiths, University of London, Cornell University, the Mayo Clinic, and many others.

Program outline:

The aim of year 1 is for candidates to familiarise themselves with a given industry, mapping the landscape, to identify areas of opportunity for high-impact venture creation. In a process we call Scoping, candidates will identify the optimal solution to a given problem and, alongside accredited courses such as experimental design, perform lab work to develop their hypotheses and contact partner research groups for further experimentation.

Year 2 is focused on invention, and further developing the initial hypotheses, working within leading research groups to prove the technology against the original hypothesis and validate it through technoeconomic analysis.

The goal for year 3 is venture creation, building further on the research from the previous two years, to develop a scalable technology, capable of product market fit. If necessary, candidates may join multiple different research groups to do this. Having validated the technology, candidates will work with experienced venture partners to build a complementary team and a rock-solid investment case, before engaging with some of the 400+ investors that DSV co-invests alongside.

Upon graduating, all the intellectual property is transferred into the new venture, which the candidate continues to lead as a co-founder, with continuous support from DSV.

Full details of the program, including FAQs and Prospectus Download available on the dedicated VSD site here.